


in the interests of your health and safety

by songlin



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Gen, Hospitalization, Hospitals, Mania, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 06:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7423690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock feels curiously impure. The fragile barrier between his consciousness and the threatening blackness shudders. He fights to look away from it. </p><p>"Are you ready to talk about why you are here?" the doctor asks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the interests of your health and safety

**Author's Note:**

> So, warnings: some thoughts of suicide, thoughts of homicide, and...is mental illness a warning? Let's err on the side of yes.
> 
> This is less a perfectly accurate depiction of bipolar disorder and more a sort of...abstract watercolor painting of it. Much of this was autobiographical. At least one chunk came from journal entries written by me while in the deepest depths of crazy. Ironically, author was manic _off her tits_ for the writing of the entire second half and for the posting, so concrit is extremely welcome. God knows I'll be giving it a second read when I'm less barmy.

Mutely, Sherlock pushes his clothes into a plastic bag. Shirt, trousers, pants—no shoes, and his mind momentarily reaches for "why" and then slides off of the relevant information. His thoughts are too slick to hold. He takes up the flimsy gown and pulls it on.

As he ties it in place, presence departs. His arms sink to his sides and he sinks down onto the hospital bed. The plastic bag crinkles underneath him, forcing his legs into an awkward, slightly raised position.

There is a knock on the door. "Mr. Holmes?" a woman asks. Nurse. Not the one from before. Sherlock does not reply. She comes in anyways.

Sherlock allows himself to be manipulated back up and into a wheelchair. His head lolls forward onto his chest and he leaves it there, staring down at his hands, observing the blue veins in his arms.

———

Sherlock does not sleep, but he is not awake. Sunlight beams in through the windows, filtered through metal mesh. He is so, so tired, but still he cannot sleep.

He hates this place.

Some small, still-alert fragment of consciousness endeavors to mark the passage of time. Sherlock moves his eyes to look for a clock, the lifting of his head being too unbearable to even contemplate. He finds none.

Periodically, the door to the room swishes open. This could be every five minutes, or every hour. The difference is inconsequential. Sherlock counts these by ticking them off on his fingers. In the spaces between, he drifts.

After twelve, a nurse leaves a tray at his bedside, then leaves.

Passion flares in Sherlock's veins. He lashes out, striking the tray off the table and onto the floor. The crash and clatter and mess is primally satisfying…until it is not. The feeling of cruel approval ebbs out, and Sherlock just feels ashamed and unclean.

He pulls the blanket up over himself and waits to begin counting again.

———

The doctor is a moderately unattractive woman who is obviously aware of the fact, judging by her weekly manicures, freshly dyed hair, and thick layer of makeup. They succeed merely in making her hair look too dry, her eyes too sunken, and her nose too large. She pinches her pen awkwardly around her talon-like fingernails and looks at Sherlock impassively over the tops of her reading glasses.

"Could you state your name and birthdate?"

Sherlock stares mutely at the ceiling. "Sherlock Holmes, January 6, 1976."

"Do you know where you are?"

For one sickening second, the answer is "no." But then it comes back to him, and he replies in words that take too long to form on his tongue.

"Do you understand why you are here?"

The answer to that comes immediately, oppressively, swelling up in his chest. He has been disposed of. Tidied away.

There are other memories as well, but distant, as if they had happened years rather than hours ago. These memories are hot and volatile to the touch, and examining them would require unimaginable effort.

The doctor does not take his extended silence for affirmation. "You have been detained under the Mental Health Act. Your brother—"

"I know."

The doctor purses her lips in what Sherlock recognizes is supposed to be a sympathetic, but clinically removed expression. He saw it on the orderly who came in to clean up his breakfast.

"And how are you feeling this morning?"

Sherlock instantaneously, fervently loathes her. Something shutters in his mind, the black blankness being shut out behind a set of doors, and the forefront of his thoughts is entirely composed of the force with which he wishes himself _away_.

"Like I should have killed myself yesterday while I had the chance," he snaps. "You're familiar with the feeling, aren't you?"

The doctor blinks, but otherwise does not react. Calmly, she sets down her pen, leans back, and tugs her sleeves down the crucial extra inches over her wrists.

"We're not talking about me," she says, tone entirely, hatefully indifferent. "We're talking about you."

Sherlock sneers. "Talk about whatever you like," he says.

He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back in his bed.

"To the best of your knowledge, did you develop normally as a child?"

Sherlock snorts a laugh.

"Could you elaborate?"

"I could."

"Would you please?"

The doctor's persistence makes Sherlock feel curiously impure. The fragile barrier between his consciousness and the threatening blackness shudders. He fights to look away from it. In desperation, he gives an answer.

"Yes."

It is a lie, but perhaps now they will move on and he will stop feeling as if he is treading water. The doctor purses her lips. She knows it is a lie. The impure feeling expands. Sherlock swallows tightly. He is in control. If answers are the cost he must pay to maintain that, answers he will give. He must maintain.

"Have you ever had any trouble with the law?"

No, never, never officially, only the look on Lestrade's face when Sherlock rolled his sleeves up to the elbow without thinking, stupid, _stupid_ , how could he be so—

"Sherlock?"

"No," he says quickly, but too late: his voice sounds humiliatingly small and tremulous. He covers his ears with his hands and hates himself for it.

Distantly, the doctor says, "Would you like me to come back later?" Sherlock can only shake his head.

When the door shuts behind her, he sobs, just once, and melts sideways into his bed.

"I hate this place," he whispers to no one at all.

———

"Holmes? There's a phone call for you."

Mycroft. Sherlock bites the inside of his cheek.

"Would you like to take it?"

Sherlock imagines his brother's voice on the other end: "Oh, Sherlock." Scornful. Disdainful.

"Holmes?"

He debates which is the more difficult, shaking his head or forcing the word "no" up through his throat and past his lips. He settles on doing the latter.

At the click of the door shutting, Sherlock lets the despair pull him under.

———

Sherlock is treading water, and someone is weighing him down.

The sensation is not unfamiliar, but he has always been able to manipulate himself into a semblance of humanity through willpower or, in extremis, chemical intervention. Does that not mean that his current state is a result of personal weakness and failure? Is his self-awareness of his receding sanity not evidence of the preventability of this absurd bout of self-pity?

The thought shames him, and the shame drags him deeper. Sherlock would give anything, _anything_ , to be free of it, and the idea of such freedom from here, from himself burns in him like gasoline, driving his thoughts onwards and upwards.

He runs the scenarios. Although he is on the fourth floor, the windows are reinforced, and there is metal between himself and the glass. The sheets are flimsy enough to tear if he uses his teeth, but not so flimsy they would rip further under his weight. Hope surges—but no, there is no outcropping sturdy or high enough. He could tie it very short to the shower head and let his weight hang, but he cannot be sure that his survival instincts will not engage.

Sherlock settles for scratching open a scab on his arm. The pain and the sight of his own repulsive, toxic blood seeping out of his body are moderately soothing.

———

An orderly brings him another meal. He waits until she is gone, tears the sandwich into pieces until it looks sufficiently nibbled upon, pours the juice down the sink, and flushes the yogurt down the toilet. The hollowness in his stomach feels like the only thing keeping him alive. It hurts, but necessarily.

Within living memory, he was a metropolis, but there is a chasm in him where life once was.

———

Sherlock surfaces enough to survey the terrain. His room is spartan: bed, bedside table, built-in bookshelves (empty), small ensuite bathroom, television. No personal effects. No clock. When he tries the television, he finds it is broken. When he tries the door, he finds it is locked. There is a slice missing out of the top of it, big enough for someone to see in but not so big that someone could climb out through it.

He presses the call button. As he waits, he scratches at the cheap covering on the bedside table. The nurse who arrives is young, dating a firefighter, and new on the unit.

"Holmes?" she says. "Do you need anything?"

"Why is my door locked?"

Her cheery smile falters into that familiar expression of distant sympathy. "It's only a temporary safety measure."

"Mine?" Sherlock fires back. "Or yours?"

The nurse does not answer. "The doctor is coming to talk to you again, if that's alright."

Sherlock could almost laugh.

———

The doctor does return, with a guest.

Sherlock slants an empty look at the open door. When he sees who has come, something tips sideways in him, towards ugly, roiling rage. He sits bolt upright and points to the door. "Get out," he snaps.

Mycroft smiles wanly. It does not reach his eyes. "Hello, little brother."

"Your brother and I have been in conversation," the doctor says, still hatefully calm. Sherlock wonders what it would take to break her composure, and indulges in a brief fantasy in which he dives forward, snatches up her pen, and—

"Dr. Sethi suggested involving me in your conversation," says Mycroft.

He is not moving, but Sherlock can see he is looking around the room, observing. Good. Let him see what he has done, the place he has trapped his brother.

"Mycroft has given me the bulk of your history, but we thought you should have the opportunity to confirm the information," the doctor says.

Rather than reply, Sherlock fixes a glare of such visceral, glistening hatred upon his brother that Mycroft physically twitches. Sherlock is spitefully satisfied.

Mycroft does not leave, though. Nor is he struck down with a sudden and painful coronary event, as Sherlock would like. Instead, Mycroft says, "Actually, perhaps we could have a moment to ourselves?" It's phrased as a question, but has the trappings of an order. The doctor nods and departs.

Mycroft looks around for a chair and finds none. For a moment, he seems to be considering whether to sit on the edge of Sherlock's bed. He opts to stand.

"How are you?" he asks.

Sherlock scoffs.

The corner of Mycroft's lip twitches, as if he is considering a wince. "The nurses say you aren't eating."

"Just because we can't all eat like you—"

"Sherlock," Mycroft says patiently. "You have to—"

"Don't patronize me, Mycroft, don't you fucking dare. You haven't a leg to stand on."

He isn't cracking. Sherlock wants to rip into him until he screams.

"You aren't well," Mycroft says, in the same hatefully placatory tone. "If you cooperate, you may find the experience more productive."

Something is shaking loose in Sherlock, something frighteningly like a sob, at the prospect of "experience" and the attendant implications of "more" and "longer" in this horrible place.

"There is nothing here," he hisses, although it comes out awfully high and hysterical. "Look around this room! There's nothing to see in it, _nothing_ , and I can _feel_ my mind going to rot!"

Mycroft's face has gone tight and composed. He is feeling something, but Sherlock cannot see past and inside.

"Your mind was going to rot long before you came here," he says. "Call me if you need anything."

In lieu of anything more breakable, Sherlock throws his pillow at the door when it has, with great finality, shut and locked behind his brother.

———

An orderly stands by and waits for him to eat his dinner. Hating everyone, Sherlock does so. It comes with a single white pill. Sherlock cheeks it. The orderly does not notice, or does not say anything. When he is gone, Sherlock crushes it up and flushes it down the toilet.

He sleeps a long time.

———

In the morning, he is restless and bored, neither black of mood nor teeming with anger. Merely…rattling.

The pill is back at breakfast. Sherlock repeats his performance from the night before, reasoning that if they can't catch him at it, they're not worth their jobs.

———

"Are you ready to talk about why you are here?" the doctor asks.

Sherlock sighs dramatically and rolls his eyes. "What could I possibly tell you that you haven't already gotten from my brother?"

He can see why Mycroft is so fond of her now, as a matter of fact. She has the same sort of level detachment. Sherlock despises it in both of them.

"I'd like to hear what you remember of it," she says.

What he can remember? He can remember all of it. He's not one of the simple-minded dementia patients whose lunch he sees on the meal cart. It's all quite simple, if marginally embarrassing. He is in full control of himself, something his brother never quite understands. There were three cases (Three! At once!) inside of a week, all of which he brought to brilliant conclusions. He had felt the approach of a plunge in mood, as he has experienced before, but he has prodigious experience in offsetting these with work or, in urgent circumstances, chemical means. He attempted the former means, but there was a malfunction. Only minor, perfectly manageable, but then there was a fault in the case. A mistake. A woman crippled. Sherlock had resorted to cocaine and reacted…unusually. From that, Mycroft had overreacted, and now Sherlock finds himself here.

Sherlock says much of this out loud. No matter. It is likely incomprehensible to the doctor's inferior intellectual capabilities.

The doctor tries to talk to him about the cocaine and Sherlock sneers. He is so darkly disappointed with these people already, and he will not be able to stomach their tedious disapproval of his methods. What else is he expected to do, when he has spent days at a time high on nothing so plebeian as drugs? Granted, in the moments when he has been high on the rush of thought and emotion, on input and output, on action, he cannot imagine why a person might ever desire artificial stimulants. He spins solutions from the raw firmament he is given, he breathes in ephemera and exhales brilliance. 

And then the moment begins to slip away from him, and suddenly, desperately, he understands the need for outside means. The thought of losing the exultant brilliance is intolerable.

Instead of saying any of this, he tells the doctor about her cheating husband.

———

They send him _therapists_.

Has Sherlock ever been abused? Has he ever been in trouble with the police? Has he ever had thoughts of suicide? Does he have a method in mind? Does he drink alcohol? Does he smoke? How often? Has he used illegal drugs? What kind of drugs? How often? Has he ever tested positive for HIV or hepatitis?

How does he feel right now? How would he rate his mood in the past week? Does he feel as if he is control of himself when he feels that way? What led to his admission? What is his relationship like with his brother?

When they have gone, Sherlock feels as drained as if he had just run a marathon.

———

The pill arrives with dinner. Distracted and still tired from the therapists, Sherlock takes it without thinking. He considers forcing himself to vomit, but it would undoubtedly draw exactly the wrong sort of attention.

There is no pill at breakfast.

———

The next day, they unlock his door.

Sherlock immediately launches himself out into the hallway and nearly staggers at the relief of _new input._ He sets out to explore his prison.

It is a disappointment: two hallways in a V shape, each one six rooms long, a nurse's station at where they join across from a small room with several tables. They are kept in by at least three doors, one of which is guarded by an orderly who has at least four inches and fifty pounds on Sherlock. Roaming the halls is a man of at least eighty with a vacant expression that makes Sherlock's stomach twist. At one of the tables is a green-haired woman in her twenties, folding a piece of paper into various geometric shapes.

Sherlock is feeling increasingly cagey in a way that will only end in an outburst. He eyes the orderly. The orderly eyes him back. Hatefully, Sherlock slides into a chair next to the woman.

She eyes him warily. "They brought you in Monday?" she asks.

Sherlock considers this. "What day is it?"

The woman thinks. "Wednesday."

Sherlock counts the meals he has been served. "Yes."

"They'll send you to art therapy tomorrow," she says. "Unless you're a big fan of coloring pages, you might as well stay here."

Sherlock is vaguely afraid that at his current rate, he might become a fan of coloring pages. He looks at the paper the woman is folding, and back at her face.

"You're not mad," he says.

She smiles, a bit sadly. "Two admitting doctors say I am, and they couldn't be wrong, could they?"

For reasons he cannot quite pinpoint, the fear in the pit of Sherlock's stomach swells.

He sits in amicable silence with the woman until a therapist comes and fetches her away. Some time later, the elderly man wanders back through.

"What are you up to, Chambers?" asks one of the nurses at the station, with a tired voice that sounds as if she couldn't care less about what Mr. Chambers is up to.

"My friend," he says, "I'm looking for my friend."

"Your friends are all at home," the nurse says, without looking up from her screen.

The old man shakes his head, frowning. "No, no," he says. "She's not at home. She's a thousand miles from home."

"I don't know," says the nurse flatly.

"My friend," the old man insists. "With the lovely green hair."

Sherlock decides he prefers his room after all, but the man's words seem to stick in him in a way he cannot shake.

———

In the loneliness of his room, Sherlock turns his critical eyes on himself and finds himself, while quite probably some level of mentally ill, not a danger to himself or others. Rather than reporting this outright to the nurse who comes to take his vitals, he asks how long he is going to be in the hospital.

The nurse smiles tightly. "We'll see how you're doing."

The seeds of panic blossom in Sherlock's chest.

———

At dinner, he takes the pill.

———

The man across the hall had been a doctor. Sherlock overhears him arguing with his nurse, insisting they are drugging his food. The nurse calmly informs him that they would never do that. The ex-doctor is willing to abandon the topic, and switches to trying to convince the nurse he doesn't belong there.

"I know psychiatry was not my specialty," he says in an urgent, but very collected voice, "but I know this much from my patient experience: the longer you keep someone out of their environment, the more confused they will become."

Sherlock clamps his pillow over his ears to shut out the rest, before the panic drowns him out entirely.

———

The days take on a pattern of events: breakfast, doctor, lunch, therapists, dinner. These are interrupted by periodic interruptions to ask if Sherlock would like to go to yoga, or art therapy, or something equally tedious. He understands from the green-haired woman that some of the others go to _group_ therapy. He is not envious.

Reason has emerged from the cloud of darkness in Sherlock's mind. In the long stretches of time between events, he reviews the facts.

His mind is fractured, but not broken. He is not, at present, a danger to himself or others. He has always known his moods rose and fell, and is willing to allow that some level of pharmaceutical assistance may be necessary. He is not opposed to pharmaceuticals, and anything that keeps the black moods at bay is worth considering.

He has to get out of here.

———

The green-haired woman has wheedled a dry-erase marker from the nurses, and is using it to doodle on the table. Sherlock could eat himself with envy.

"Want one?" she asks.

Sherlock could kiss her.

When he has acquired a marker of his own, he sketches out a map of the hospital as best as he can remember, and works out the quickest escape routes. None of them are viable without an outside accomplice.

———

Sherlock becomes skilled in the precise, introspective language the therapists and nurses and doctors all like to hear. Their smiles are approving, every one a coin that will one day buy his freedom. Sherlock assures them he is feeling fine, much better than he was.

———

"I believe you have bipolar disorder," says the doctor.

Sherlock does not point out that she might have told him this before starting him on medication a week ago. "That sounds reasonable," he says instead, schooling his face into what he imagines someone should look like upon learning that they have a chronic mental illness. He has some knowledge of the condition, and he cannot disagree with her. He would like to do more reading, but that is nothing he can accomplish inside these walls.

"How are you feeling about that?"

_Like running,_ Sherlock thinks.

"Better to have a name to put to the feeling," he says, with a fake, placid smile. "I'm feeling fine now."

———

Sherlock wakes up one morning and realizes he cannot remember which of the available routes from his flat to Bart's has the coffee shop with the chocolate croissants he loves.

He spends the time between waking and breakfast curled into a ball, willing his heart rate down.

He has to get out.

———

On his twelfth day in hospital, the green-haired woman is discharged. When Sherlock asks, they will not give him a whiteboard marker.

———

"About how much longer do you think I have, Doctor?" Sherlock asks, his voice steady only through a Herculean effort.

The doctor smiles. "We'll see. You're doing very well. How are your moods?"

Sherlock, as always, feels fine.

———

Mycroft visits on the fifteenth day. Sherlock does not hiss at him. In fact, he is shocked and horrified by the force with which he wants to plead desperately with his brother to take him away.

"The doctor says you are doing well," he says cautiously.

Sherlock opens his mouth. He means to agree, but instead what comes out is, "I have to leave." Mycroft's face begins to shutter, and Sherlock continues hastily, "I am well, Mycroft. I am better than I have been in years, but they will not let me out until I am not better but _changed_. _"_ Sherlock realizes his hands are trembling, and he fists them in his sheets. "I am forgetting things," he says through clenched teeth. "It isn't me either, Mycroft, it's this _place,"_ and then the words come in a proper rush: "It will destroy me if you let it, it will make me less, so Mycroft, _please_ , I will finish every banal errand you send me on, I will go with Mother and Father on their horrible tourist excursions, I will never so much as look at cocaine again in my life if you will _just get me out."_

At the end of this, Sherlock is shaking openly, and Mycroft is still with shock.

"I shall…see what can be done," he says slowly.

Sherlock sinks back in the pillows and takes a deep, deep breath.

"Thank you," he breathes.

When he opens his eyes again, his brother has gone.

———

When the doctor comes the next morning and says, "I'm to assess whether you are fit for discharge," Sherlock nearly weeps.

No, Sherlock has not had any recent thoughts of suicide. He feels fine. He has been taking his medication. He feels a little anxious (a little!) but otherwise fine. He has been eating, showering. He has no plans to take drugs and will look at local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. (He makes no promises about attending.) He will attend appointments with an outside psychiatrist to manage his medication. He feels fine.

At the end of the interview, the doctor smiles the first genuine smile Sherlock has seen. "You're good to go," she says.

When the door shuts, Sherlock crumples and sobs, just once. Any more and someone might hear.

———

Sherlock's clothes feel heavy after the weeks of hospital scrubs. Mycroft is waiting outside the doors to escort him out.

Sherlock cannot shake the irrational feeling that at any minute, Mycroft is going to grab him by the arm and drag him back in. Sherlock thinks that if he does that, he will fight him. He will not be able to stop himself.

But instead, Mycroft simply leads him out of the hospital and into a waiting car, where Sherlock collapses.

They do not speak.

Sherlock leans his head against the window and closes his eyes, relishing the input. He opens his eyes occasionally to take in more, but it isn't necessary. He is gliding, his mind is singing.

The car stops outside his flat on Montague Street. Sherlock opens the door of the car.

"Sherlock," Mycroft says. There is something off about his voice, but Sherlock can't be arsed to work it out. "You are…better?"

Sherlock slants a look back at him. He lacks the hatred to give it the fire it deserves, so it is merely blank and bleak. Mycroft does not shrivel, but he does acquiesce.

"I'm fine," Sherlock says, landing heavily on the words.

Sherlock slams the door. It is pettily satisfying.

———

Sherlock takes his medication, because the black moods are inconvenient, and because he will never go to a hospital again.

He sees his psychiatrist often enough to get refills. Yes, he's taking his medication. He's feeling fine. No thoughts of suicide. No drugs.

(That last answer isn't the strictest truth, but he's under control.)

Sherlock is better.

Sherlock is also worse.

The doctors at Bart's fill him with a vague and irrational suspicion, as if they _know_. He snaps at them and demeans them when they are wrong, and it feels like justice.

Years later, he is cut on the arm, and his friend says, "I'm taking you to hospital."

They get as far as the door before panic washes over him, and he turns and walks straight out.

The next morning, after Sherlock has gotten stitches in the kitchen of a different flat, on Baker Street, his friend asks him how he's feeling.

Sherlock is feeling fine.


End file.
